29-year-old horticulturist designed the 14-foot 'tree'

This article is part of Changemakers' Playbook, a series that looks at innovation across different industries.

What if a city bench could provide a place not just to sit but also to breathe a little easier? That's the idea behind CityTree, a 14-foot-high moss-covered, energy-efficient bench and air purifier that is popping up in cities throughout Europe and Asia. The ingenious piece of urban furniture uses the natural ability of living moss to bind with fine particles and remove them from the air — up to 82% of them — and Internet of Things (IoT) technology to measure and adjust its performance in real time.

CityTree is the brainchild of Peter Sänger, 29, a horticulturalist, entrepreneur, and the CEO of Green City Solutions. He first became passionate about fighting air pollution when traveling across the cities of Europe as a young man. "Cities are the living space of the future and have many benefits," he says. "However, healthy air is not one of them in many places."

Sänger, who comes from a family of horticulturalists, knows what he's talking about. Air pollution kills about 7 million people around the world every year, according to the World Health Organization. In places where air-quality levels exceed WHO limits, those fine particles in the air penetrate deep into the lungs and cardiovascular system, causing everything from strokes and heart disease to lung cancer and pneumonia. 

Today, 91% of the world's population lives in such places.

Bringing nature to the city

Sänger learned about the purifying effects of various kinds of plants — particularly moss — as a student of horticulture and business management at Dresden University in Germany. "That's what got me excited — finding that the solution to air pollution can only emerge in combination with nature," he says. "After all, nature has millions of years of experience in air purification."

When Sänger met Liang Wu, a fellow student who ran a workshop on urban design and environmental problems, he knew he had found a partner. "We shared the desire to develop an ecological and economic solution to this problem," Sänger says.

In 2014, before they graduated, the two friends had assembled a team of experts in horticulture, computer science, architecture, and mechanical engineering, and launched Green City Solutions.

The company, which has 35 employees, set about answering a simple but challenging question: How can we bring nature into the city and use its positive effects on the atmosphere at scale? Its answer was the CityTree, which has the power to purify the breathing volume of 7,000 people per hour, using a combination of technology and design.

An oasis of breathability 

From the outside, the CityTree appears to be little more than a bench with a tower covered in moss. But inside is a fully automated, sensor-controlled irrigation system that provides the moss with optimal moisture. The integrated IoT technology provides constant feedback on performance and conditions, as well as environmental data from the surrounding area.

CityTree is popping up in cities around Europe, like Berlin. Green City Solutions

According to Green City Solutions, the CityTree improves the air quality around it by up to 53% and can cool the surrounding air by 4 degrees Celsius. The unit is not intended to make a demonstrable difference in air quality throughout a city, Sänger says, but it can provide an oasis of breathable air in places where people tend to linger.

"Think of a bus stop on a busy street, a street cafe?, a train platform, an inner-city schoolyard, even a company campus," he says. CityTrees can be found in cities across Europe and Asia, including London, Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Hong Kong, and Cork, Ireland. Sänger says Green City Solutions is exploring venture-capital funding in the US to break into the North American market.

An ambitious plan

For Green City Solutions, the CityTree is just the beginning. The company is testing the WallBreeze, a modular moss wall that can be installed on the exterior walls of buildings. Using the same technology and filtration system as the CityTree, the WallBreeze can provide more breathable air in the area surrounding the installation.

And the next iteration of the CityTree is a more slender model that contains a digital billboard on one side and a moss wall on the other. Known as CityBreeze, the new model — intended for bus stops and train stations — is designed to pay for itself through advertising revenue. 

Overall, Sänger says Green City Solution's goal is to install up to 1,000,000 square meters (more than 5 million square feet) of active mosses by 2030, which would clean the air for 500 million people and remove up to 80,000 tons of carbon dioxide.

It's an ambitious plan that requires buy-in from city governments around the world. But Sänger says the reaction he's seen to the CityTree gives him hope that support for green solutions is rapidly growing.
   

"Thankfully, it seems that the public and also governments are really starting to understand the importance of investing in environmental changes," he says. "So I would say that now, more than ever, I am convinced about the importance of our mission."

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This post was created by Insider Studios with ING.

Header photo: Peter Sänger is the CEO of Green City Solutions. Credit: Green City Solutions

Source: Business Insider

Source: Business Insider